Critical Essay by Louis Carini

SOURCE: "Ernst Cassirer's Psychology: A Unification of Perception and Language," in Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. IX, No. 2, April, 1973, pp. 148-51.

In the following essay, Carini explores the often-neglected implications of Cassirer's language philosophy for the field of modern psychology.

While Ernst Cassirer's three volume philosophy of symbolic forms is clearly a philosophy, there is also a psychology presented there that Cassirer assumed would be the forerunner of any modern psychology. But Cassirer's optimism on that score was not borne out, for that psychology has been completely bypassed. And yet, Cassirer was so astute on scientific matters that Margenau, the Yale physicist, in his Preface to Cassirer's Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics, concludes that, except for minor details, Cassirer's 1935 views may still be taken as the last word on that issue. The psychology that Cassirer...